Jenkins: Obama Gets a Do-Over

The president wins re-election, but what he hopes to achieve in a second term is a mystery.

By

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Nov. 7, 2012 12:33 a.m. ET

Punditry did not cover itself in glory in the closing days of election 2012. For the seventh race in a row, Republicans nominated somebody conspicuously not associated with the right wing of the party, infuriating liberals who saw their theory of the election and the country confounded. They went unsubtly about trying to make the world fit their worldview.

In response to his statement that he wanted no more Iraqs, they invented a past for
Mitt Romney
as a warmonger. They accused him of wanting to destroy Detroit, though the primary document, his New York Times op-ed, was suspiciously close to the plan later adopted by President Obama.

Mitt the Social Darwinist, Mitt the gutter of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—Mr. Romney should send half the nation's writers a bill for the psychotherapy services he provided them.

Similarly overheated imaginations on the right painted
Barack Obama
as a hardened socialist rather than what he is, a peddler of LBJ-Nixon big government hubris well past its sell-by date.

On Wednesday, we woke up to the same old reality, divided government and an overextended fisc whose options are steadily narrowing. The country may start to wonder what the pundits are good for, when it figures out how little help they provided in the voting booth.

Mr. Obama now can be expected to claim a mandate, one whose content he will perhaps share in his memoirs. Judging by his campaign, he expected his victory margin to come from single women frightened that their abortions and contraception would be taken away.

This is a mandate to do what? That is, besides a mandate to keep frightening women about abortion and contraception every time Democrats need to scare up a few votes in close races?

We have 50-50 elections; we have campaigns focused on micro-targeting and scheming soundbites, for a reason: Voters are ready neither to reform the welfare state nor pay for it, but at least we got a bit closer to airing the question in this race than in previous ones. You can thank Romney-Ryan for that.

The CBS show harked back to an imaginary postwar comity, never touching on the obvious point that it's easier for politicians to compromise on how to spread among voters the ever-larger largess of an ever-growing government.

Never would it occur to "60 Minutes" that our bitterly static electorate and politics is the inevitable output of our predecessors' collegial over-commitment of nonexistent surpluses to provide benefits that all of us now know some of us won't be getting.

In this context, what we can expect from Mr. Obama is an almost comic mystery. In 2008, when it became clear he was going to win the White House, he delivered the irrelevant boast that "a new energy economy . . . that's going to be my No. 1 priority."

The parallel moment in this year's campaign was his late, off-the-record insistence to the Des Moines Register that, upon being re-elected, he will deliver a grand bipartisan bargain on taxes and entitlements that he never mentioned to voters.

Why do we link these two moments? In 2008, Mr. Obama got his energy revolution, albeit one he didn't seek—shale gas, which had the ironic effect of rendering more uneconomic his solar and wind subsidies. Even as his EPA worked to undermine shale, shale (by displacing coal) made America the only large economy to reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions in recent years.

Shale also went a long way toward keeping Pennsylvania and Ohio in the president's column.

If this pattern holds, Mr. Obama's next four years are easy to predict. He will fail to pay for the welfare state by raising taxes on the rich, and the rich will respond by inventing the technologies that so increase the wealth of our country that Medicare and ObamaCare (with reasonable modifications) will become affordable.

Are we being hyperbolic? Yes. But the shale episode is a valuable lesson. Two centuries of American entrepreneurial culture, the crazy can-doism and expertise about a zillion things that resides in the brains of Americans, is still a huge force.

Whoever was elected yesterday stood a good chance of inheriting a belated rebound in the U.S. economy. He could also hope for a continuation, at least for a while, of the peculiar dynamic that has allowed the U.S. to finance nearly infinite deficits at almost no cost.

If so, there will be a window of opportunity if Mr. Obama would only use it. The Rube Goldbergism of ObamaCare, added to the Rube Goldbergism already extant in our health-care system, in our view never made him the "transformational" president he sought to be. He can still be a consequential president, though. But his opportunity will quickly go pear-shaped if the bond market loses confidence in him to bring discipline to our long experiment in Depublican and Remocrat borrowing and spending.

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